The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  At any rate, the Ixian branch of the Star Rattler cult would become Ix’s most powerful non-clan-based organization. Koh would set up shop near the Star-Rattler’s mul—which was in a good location in Ix, “downtown,” I guess you could say, but which currently wasn’t large and wasn’t very well funded—and 2JS would have to keep her and her followers happy. And one of her conditions would be that the ruling coalition would have to build my tomb, to my specifications. And if that got done in time, I could get the gel mixed up, get buried per the ROC specifications, and the next thing I knew I’d be back in the merrie olde twenty-first century with a headful of Sacrifice Game expertise and a revitalized Will to Power.

  20 Blue Snail said even though the Ocelots had gotten the gossip from Teotihuacán about our role in wrecking the place, they still couldn’t disinvite us. We’d be welcome as clansmen of the Harpies. Delegates from both cat and raptor clans were coming from all the important cities of the highlands and lowlands. Even Severed Right Hand was officially invited, although since he was still only at Ka’an, near the coast, he’d be too far away. And for every official guest there’d be at least ten peripheral people arriving in Ix over the next few days, vendors, traders, smart oddsmakers and destitute addict gamblers, prostitutes, clowns, wandering families, whatever.

  Finally, 20 Blue Snail said the buzz was that Koh’s Star-Rattler’s cult was growing “in four directions,” that is, all over the world, and that 2JS was interested in helping serve Star Rattler. Koh was impassive, of course. I couldn’t tell whether he was just flattering her. Then, as though it was an afterthought, he mentioned that the date of the ball game had been moved up two suns. He said it was for some astronomical reasons, but also that the Ocelots were behind it. Anyway, it gave us only eleven days to get to Ix.

  There’s no way, I thought. The fastest marching rate for the whole army—even discounting the elders, the women, children, the sick, the dead, and the inessential baggage—couldn’t possibly be over a jornada, that is, about thirty miles per day, and we had over three hundred miles to go in eleven days. We could do it if we forced four or maybe even just three extra marches, but the line would get strung out and even the bloods would be exhausted when they entered Ix. I looked at Hun Xoc and Koh and could tell they were doing the same calculations. As far as I knew no group this size had ever moved that fast. We’d have to set a record.

  Hun Xoc asked permission of the rest of the circle to speak in house code.

  Everyone signaled that it was all right.

  “The Lady Koh’s four hundred clans won’t make it,” Hun Xoc said.

  “They’ll have to seek asylum somewhere else.”

  Not true, 20 Blue Snail answered in the same language, Koh’s children can’t stay outcasts for much longer.

  What he meant was that the main thing Koh needed was to stabilize her base. She might be able to afford to keep the cat clans as enemies for a while, but to do that she’d need to reach some sort of stable rapprochement with as many of the other international (to use the word loosely) ruling families as possible. As of now, she could count only the Fog lineage and the rest of 3 Talon’s aerial clans, and maybe the Ixian Harpies, as friends. Settling respectably in Ix as an invited clan leader—at least temporarily—would be her best chance.

  I looked at him. You couldn’t read anything under the duckbill mask. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much he looked like one of the plates in this nineteenth-century book on the Maya by Stepanwald. I pretended to ease myself back and used the motion to sneak a look at Koh. I had the feeling she understood what 20 Blue Snail was saying, and that he was right.

  They passed the speaking cup to Lady Koh.

  She asked when we’d have our meeting with 2JS. I guess she didn’t want to deal with anyone but him and you couldn’t blame her.

  He can’t come outside Ix to meet you, Hun Xoc said. From the way he said it I got the feeling 2JS was under polite house arrest. 20 Blue Snail said we wouldn’t all be able to talk when we got near the city, either, we’d be in a ceremonial procession and under constant observation. It was going to be like an inauguration or royal ball. For now, all we could do was accept the invitation and get there.

  Then we need to get a few beats alone with him just before the hipball game, Koh said.

  20 Blue Snail said he’d try. And if a fight breaks out, what then? he asked.

  The Rattler’s children will support their host, Koh said.

  The Ocelots won’t let all of your followers into the court district, Hun Xoc said. At most they’ll let in two or four hundred of the highest bloods. The rest will have to stay as close as possible outside and wait for our signal.

  Koh signed that was good enough. We voted “agreed.”

  ( 23 )

  You could have individual conversations in the “smoke,” the after part of the mat circle, when you were all just hanging around, not necessarily at your own position, and it was even considered polite to doze off. Sleeping’s a big part of bonding. It’s hard to describe the cozy factor of the huge foster family and my growing place in it. The clan definined who and what you were so strongly and so completely that, as naturally as F = ma, you’d be willing to die for it in a beat. It, and not you, was you. Anyway, at the southwest end of the round room, Hun Xoc, 1 Gila, and 2 Hand were getting their knee calluses massaged and drinking out of the balche pot through long bullrush straws. On the white side, I mean, the northeast side, near the little door, the two Rattler greatmothers were still sitting bolt up on their backrests and chatting together, smoking and weaving elaborate shrouds on little hip-strap looms. Coati was stirring the fire. The emissaries had already done their big leave-taking, so they wouldn’t have to go through it again, and Zero Porcupine Clown had taken them off to their own over-storm house with a bunch of the Rattler Clan’s sex workers and gamblers, a few of whom were also trained listeners and mnemonists, just in case they said anything. Koh had told the gamblers to let them win. Most of them would escort us to Ix, but a couple of runners were going to rush back to 2JS as soon as the storm let up. I was reclining on top of my two dressers and pets, and the younger brother was rubbing oil into my feet and ankles, which were still scabby from volcanic ash. I guess maybe that sounds a little odd. But it wasn’t in a sexual way. In fact, none of us were supposed to do any sex on the trip, even though the local chicks and dicks all wanted to service us godlings, because the adders said our semen trail would make it easier for Severed Right Hand’s hit squads to track us. I was just leaning on them because they were used to it and it was cold and I was entitled to the service. There was more touching in general around here, although if you touched someone you weren’t supposed to that was it for you. Supposedly Shang emperors used to sleep on mounds of people. Anyway I was just calming down enough to close my eyes when Koh kneed over to me. Her big quilted turquoise-blue manto was tied a little like a giant stiff bathrobe. My dressers propped me up into a more formal attitude. Koh settled into her position on the mat and unrolled another world-map version of the Sacrifice Game board, a less elaborate traveling model. On this one the central circle represented our own army or migration or whatever, and she piled stones in it representing how many different types of people we had, 62-score full bloods, 9-score sick or wounded bloods, 410-score scouts, dressers, and calligraphers, about 700-score converted men and roughly 1,202 score converted women and children, 812-score porters, 2,108-score thralls and captives, and over 3,500-score stragglers who really didn’t have any reason to be with us. Of course, the Star Rattler societies in other cities were revitalized by Koh’s success, and they were pledging tens of thousands of new converts, but until her chickens got here she wasn’t counting them.

  She subtracted stones for how many of each grade of person we were likely to lose to raids and how many to attrition and starvation. A lot of people don’t have a head for logistics, how many bowls of gruel each soldier ate per week or whatever. They want to hear how a lone hero won a whole war single-hand
ed. Koh was the opposite. She wanted to reduce the uncertainty as much as possible before she even started to do her really serious calculations.

  Koh set out carved disks representing the major cities, with a saucery green one standing in for Ix, and then started laying out glyphic stones into them. I recognized the stones that represented 2 Jeweled Skull, 9 Fanged Hummingbird, Severed Hand, 3 Talon—who was the patriarch of the shall-we-say “international” alliance of aerial clans—and our troops and followers, and a lot of the other clans, and us. But in general I could still understand only about ten percent of her visualization. Pretty soon she was using little brown seeds that represented hypotheticals, often in doubles and triples. She positioned the hit squads that were chasing us in four different possible spots. She guessed at food sources and weather along the route into Ix. And when she’d come to the end of her own knowledge she started asking me things. What did I think the other Caracara Greathouses were up to? How much has 2 Jeweled Skull asked them for help? What was his real relationship with the small Rattler Society of Ix? Why hadn’t the Ixian Rattler Feeder responded to her messages?

  Why do you think the Ocelots are so confident? she whispered.

  I said I guessed that actually a lot of them were terrified by the end of Teotihuacán, but that some of them were thinking they might be able to fill the gap and carry on the business of the empire with a bigger cut for themselves. They’d have to get rid of the Harpies first, though, and so they’d spent quite a bit in bribes to the supposedly neutral hipball officials, probably much more than 2JS could afford.

  But 20 Blue Snail-Shit makes 2JS sound confident, too, she said.

  I said maybe it was 6’s job to put a good spin on things.

  Koh said she thought 2JS was pretty smart. He’d have to have something worked out, some unpleasant surprise for the Ocelots that wouldn’t depend on what we did.

  I looked at her. I mean, into her eyes, which you just didn’t do. Normally her eyes—even the one surrounded by her light skin—were as cowled and tragic as if they’d been been painted by Pontormo. But now they were transparent. And they weren’t tragic. They were wary. I could tell she was thinking that 2 Jeweled Skull—in exchange for the safety of his own house—might sell her out to the Ocelots.

  “2 Jeweled Skull set this up,” I said. “Your guilt is his.”

  “He might deny that,” Koh said. “Now that more

  Feline-clan bloods hate my house than hate his.”

  If he turned you in they’d get him later anyway, I said. She didn’t answer, but from her face it seemed that she realized that was true. The Ocelots would renege. They knew he was bound up in this from the beginning and they’d never forgive him.

  “And once he’s won will he need me around?” she asked.

  “He’ll need the tsam lic, and a nine-skull adder,” I said.

  “I’m not so sure,” she said, “he’ll get those from

  9 Fanged Hummingbird, as soon as he captures him,

  If he even thinks he needs the Game at all.”

  Koh added two uncertainty stones to 2JS’s stack. I could feel my loyalties dividing. She must have seen it in me, because suddenly she started backtracking:

  “I trust my father 2 Jeweled Skull,” she said,

  “I wouldn’t plot against him, and I’m not

  Positioned to; I only want to shield

  Our followers, and leave them an escape

  In case another city crumbles on them.”

  I said I guessed that sounded like the right thing to do. Sometimes Koh’s forties-Picassoid face would seem all limpid and transparent and I’d feel all cuddly with her—not that I’d ever touched her myself or anything, but just kind of homey and peaceful—and then her face would go opaque again like that glass in Marena’s office and it was like I was alone in an observation room.

  Koh unrolled what I thought was a smaller Game-mat, but it turned out to be a detailed and relatively naturalistic map of Ix. “The ball court’s isolated here,” she said, running her little finger down its trench. She was right. The whole temple district had originally been built on a hill surrounded on three sides by a shallow irregular lake, kind of like a miniature San Francisco. Since then the lake level had been raised and palace plots had been extended out into the water, so the temple district was surrounded by wide canals, like the Rialto in Venice. The temple district included the five largest of Ix’s hundred and ten muls, six hipball courts, the Ocelots’ emerald-green greathouse, the council house, and the original sacred well of the Ocelots, which was now fed by aqueducts from the surrounding mountains but was still surrounded by a garden that included a few of the original celestial poison trees. There weren’t any solid bridges on the east, north, and west, just floating pedestrian barges that could easily be moved. Even if we were armed and ready when we took our places in the stands, we’d still be in the center of the Ocelots’ ward, separated from the mainland by the mountains behind the Ocelots’ emerald-and-scarlet mul. Two hundred of us could be trapped and picked off without much trouble. I figured the odds of something unpleasant happening to us on the court, either during or right after the ball game, were at least ten to one.

  So what can we do about it? I asked. Not go? Set up shop somewhere else?

  No, there are other things we can do, she said. We may not be able to pull another Teotihuacán, but we can do something like it. You might have to be the one to carry some of it out, though.

  ¿Yo? I thought. Little moi? Why me again, because I’m the odd man out anyway?

  Always me, me, me.

  Because you’re such a genius with the ball, she said, answering my thought.

  Chacal was the genius, I said, and he’s gone. She just sat there and looked at me, like she knew I could still play as well as before. I kind of felt she was right too. Despite everything I was feeling great these days. Finally I said fine, sure, run it by me. I can deal.

  She said as an antepenultimate plan she thought we might disguise me as one of the lesser-known ballplayers on the Harpy team and try to get me into the halach pitzom, the great-hipball game, for a couple of rounds.

  “Then you could score a ring or two and win,” she said.

  “The Ocelots would have to really cheat,

  And might not even get away with it.”

  Whoa, I thought. Hang on a beat.

  I said it sounded like fun for me—my cocktail of Chacal neurotransmitters was already perking up just at the thought of my getting onto a court.

  She said imagine the reaction. The fans would go wild, although she didn’t put it that way. Maybe they’d all give you some big hero thing and you’d be able to take over.

  I said that sounded a little too good to be true.

  Well, anyway, she said, whatever happens it would at least distract them. They’d be off their stride.

  I asked for how long and she said she didn’t know.

  So then what? I asked.

  Then we go to the antepenultimate plan, she said. Great, I thought. The ultimate plan, as always, was just to kill ourselves as quickly as possible. All right, I thought, what’s the penultimate plan? I asked her, as whateverly as I could.

  She held out her dark hand out and, slowly, turned it palm-downward. “I’ll show you,” it meant.

  ( 24 )

  Just in sight of the Cloud People’s main citadel, which would be the site of Oaxaca City, there was a place I knew well, with a tree, eventually a rather famous tree, that—which? Who?—that would still be alive at the end of the last b’aktun. I led Koh’s caravan a half-jornada off the route to camp there, and she and I fasted and prepared for a session of the nine-stone Sacrifice Game. We’d agreed that I’d be the only querent, and only her dwarf and Armadillo Shit would be attending.

  The big cypress wasn’t big yet. In fact, it looked less than a hundred years old, and it divided into three trunks near the base. So it wasn’t one that you’d ordinarily think of as a major branch of the Tree of Four Hundred T
imes Four Hundred Branches, the tree at the axis mundi that penetrated down through the hells and soared up through the holes in the centers of the thirteen skies, the tree the Teotihuacanians called the Tree of Razors and that the Motulob—the citizens of Tikal—called the Tree with the Mirror Leaves, and that, in the twenty-first century, generally gets called something like the “Maya World Tree” or even “the Mayan Yggdrasil.” But I convinced Koh that I knew what I was talking about. We started at the naming time of Lord Heat, that is, noon. Twenty arms west of the Tree there was an ancient well surrounded by a five low stone cisterns, each about two arms across. The westernmost cistern had been filled to the brim with fresh water, and Koh sat on its west side, facing east. I sat on its eastern side and, instead of presuming to make eye contact, focused on her hands. Twenty bloods, under Hun Xoc’s command, sat around us in a loose circle with about a fifty-arm radius. The sun went under a rainless cloud shelf. Her dwarf handed her a jade offering basin, with coals still smoldering in it under the ashes of offering paper, and held it up in front of her forehead to stand in for the sky.

  I looked down, into the still water. Koh looked down. We nodded to our reflected souls. They nodded back, almost immediately. Koh brought the basin sharply down onto the rim of the cistern, cracking it into pieces and scattering sparks out of the cinders. Without flinching from the embers that burned her palms, she pushed everything into the water. The shards sank and the coals and ashes floated, sizzling.